Today the prestigious medical journal, The Lancet, published a commission study that concluded that Trump and, to a large extent, his fellow Republicans are responsible for as many as 188,000 unnecessary Covid-19 related deaths in the United States over the past 12 month.
The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.
Almost 470,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far, with the number widely expected to go above half a million in the next few weeks. At the same time some 27 million people in the US have been infected. Both figures are by far the highest in the world.
In seeking to respond to the pandemic, Trump has been widely condemned for not taking the pandemic seriously enough soon enough, spreading conspiracy theories, not encouraging mask wearing and undermining scientists and others seeking to combat the virus’s spread.
What the study is careful to point out that Trump's policies and behavior may have been responsible for the excessive death rate, but government policy at almost every level - local, state and federal - has, since 2002, reduced the resources available to address public health issues in the US.
The commission condemned Trump’s response to Covid, but emphasized that the country entered the pandemic with a degraded public health infrastructure. Between 2002 and 2019, US public health spending fell from 3.21% to 2.45% – approximately half the share of spending in Canada and the UK.
Tax cuts for the rich and corporation, attacks on government health programs such as the affordable care act and persistent racism which leaves minority communities with sadly deficient health care are all characteristics of not just Trumpism, but long term Republican Party policy.
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